HALF A DAY OFF.
IIIHE working day is becoming shorter and shorter, but that does not mean that fewer and fewer people are by nature industrious. There are a great many people in the world—a large minority—who cannot be idle. If their trade or handicraft or profession does not occupy all their time, they will embrace a second, no matter whether it pays them in actual cash or not. Some of them will make a secondary profession of a hobby ; others will adopt some definitely useful employment and pursue it for gain in one form or other. For instance, the clerk in his spare time may try his hand at the arts. The man who makes his living by mechanical writing may try literary production, or may study music with a view to performance, or pictures in order to paint. The labourer may first mend and then endeavour to make his boots. The bricklayer may try to build a cottage or practise carpentry till he is able roughly to furnish one. Difficulties will of course arise if these men endeavour to sell the results of their labour, and we shall hear a great deal about " pin money." But those who .would restrict liberty do not always. succeed ; and anyhow, no one can prevent a man froin working for himself and so saving, as apart from making, his own money. If secondary occupations became at all the fashion there would be a great demand for training in crafts and " hobbies " at all the schools in the Kingdom. A great new impetus would be given to technical education, and some literary or artistic instruction would probably be insisted upon. Naturally, it would be impossible to give, even to the most promising scholar, enough such instruction to make him proficient, but enough might be done to initiate him into various forms of leisure work, and create in him a desire to go farther when he left school and had to begin to make his living. as most of us have to do, not as he chose but as he could.
One result of this new state of things, if it ever comes about, will be a great deal of very amateurish work to be seen everywhere. We shall see some very queer building and some still more outlandish furniture. We shall hear music everywhere and see a now form of " futurist " painting. • There is little evidence that the sense of beauty is strong in unsophisticated persons. Industry, however, has other and less obviously productive ways of showing itself. Give the majority of industrious men half the day which they can call their own, and a proportion of them will read and theorise and think in the greater part of their spare time. Eccentrics will be commoner than they are now, and there will be no mute, inglorious men of talent whose abilities have been squandered upon dull toil. More leisure will produce more genius. Society will have to make the best use it can of some very odd, one- sided, self-instructed, rather dangerous men of genius. Fiery fanatics and mystics on the border line of sanity will, we believe, be common. So much of the intellectual force of the sons of toil has been hitherto suppressed for want of time to develop it ; now it may very likely burst forth in an explosive manner.
What would be the result, we wonder, among pro- fessional men of a six-hour day ? They are never likely to get so short a day as the working man demands ; for one thing, they will always want a longer time of complete holiday for reasons of brain-fag. Still, the fashion of short working hours is sure to be felt from top to bottom of society. The result will be to counteract the present tendency to specialization. People will not mind their own business as they mind it now. The learned judge who with several unfilled hours in each day on his hands fits up for himself a laboratory or collects an exhaustive philosophical library will no longer say to the scientific chemist or the learned divine, " You know and I don't." He will argue. One effect of de-centralization must always be an apparent lowering of standard. In the days we are imagining fewer men will hesitate to give their opinion on any subject but their own than hesitate now. A vast number of quacks will make their voices heard, and real experts will find themselves surrounded by half-informed critics. In many ways we think they (the experts) will benefit by being obliged to face this rather rough music— they have had things too much their own way. A temp- tation to steal off with their own particular "key of knowledge " has sometimes been too much for them. One good thing at least we may hope for from the changes we have been imagining. More leisure for the working class will save the intellectual class alive. It looks like dying out. Its numbers grow less and less, but it will be recruited by all the natural scholars who have at last time to follow their true bent. There is now little differ- ence, so far as money is concerned, between the hand worker and the brain worker. Birds of a feather will flock together from everywhere. But what may we expect to be the effect of the new leisure upon the idle of all social degrees, upon the natural loafer, whether he loaf at club or pub ? We must hope he will not be quite so numerous as might logically be expected. However hopeful we may be, it is plain that a •great number of people will never do one stroke more work than they are obliged, but a great many men who have to be driven to their present all-day work by fear of poverty would very willingly give their time to doing some other better suited to their temperaments. The man who listlessly performs the tasks *hereby he wins his bread may work at home to pursue his hobby. What will be the ultimate proportion of the wheat 'to the tares under the new division of time it is impossible to say. Without venturing to speculate too wildly, we should fear the possibility of a society very widely divided. There may yawn in the near future a gulf between the frivolous and the serious wider and deeper than any that birth or money has ever created. Idleness, with time at its disposal, may become very mischievous ; industry endowed with a strong spirit of pharisaical self-satisfaction will not be wholly admirable, but, admirable or not, we suppose it will be strong enough to keep the " other half " in check, even though the other half be the larger. Will life be, on the whole, pleasanter than it is ? It is not easy to imagine an answer to that question. The industrious will have all the power and the idle most of the fun. Perhaps more people will be satisfied in their several ambitions than are satisfied now. The sense of being thwarted by circumstances may be less widespread, and possibly that is all the good that any change could give us.
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